Energy-aware Cost-effective Cooperative Mobile Streaming on Smartphones over
Hybrid Wireless Networks
Zhihao Qu
∗
, Baoliu Ye
∗
,BinTang
∗
, Sanglu Lu
∗
, Song Guo
†
,
∗
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China
Email: quzhihao@dislab.nju.edu.cn, {yebl, tb, sanglu}@nju.edu.cn
†
School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Aizu, Japan
Email: sguo@u-aizu.ac.jp
Abstract—The ever-increasing demands on mobile streaming
ov er smartphones make the cellular networks always occupied
by heavy load under traditional base-station-to-device (B2D)
based streaming architecture, and even degrade the quality
of service (QoS) seriously. To offload the traffic of cellular
networks and provide scalable mobile streaming services with
guaranteed QoS, in this paper we propose a device-to-device
(D2D) communication motiv ated cooperative streaming frame-
work by exploiting the capacity of both WiFi interface and
cellular interface equipped with smartphones. Specifically, un-
der the energy constraint of individual smartphone, we develop
technique to minimize the over traffic of the cellular network
by efficiently disseminating video over the D2D network with
multi-hop routing supported. We formulate such an energy-
aware cost-effective video dissemination problem as an integer
linear programming problem, and show it to be NP-hard
and even hard to approximate. We further present an energy
allocation based algorithm and a simulated annealing heuristic
algorithm which provide a trade-off between the performance
and complexity to support the dissemination scheduling of
cooperative mobile streaming. We evaluate the performance
effectiveness of our proposal via both theoretical analysis and
extensive simulation.
I. INTRODUCTION
The significant progress in wireless communication and
video encoding technologies makes mobile streaming ser-
vices over smartphones increasingly popular. A recent re-
port shows that the traffic of mobile data is exponentially
increasing, and 66% would be incurred by video traffic by
2015 [1]. Early mobile streaming systems generally employ
the base-station-to-device (B2D) architecture where each
mobile user downloads the video independently from the
streaming server over cellular networks such as 3G/4G.
Although the 4G technology offers significant improvement
in bandwidth, it is commonly believed that B2D based video
streaming solutions still suffer from low quality of service
due to the capacity restriction of cellular networks as well
as the fluctuation of download data rate. Even worse, the
base station forms the traffic bottleneck of service with the
increasing of streaming requests.
In fact, modern smartphones are equipped with both WiFi
and cellular network interfaces. As shown in Fig. 1, while the
cellular interface provides long-range always-on B2D con-
Base Station
B2D Cellular Link
D2D WiFi Link
Figure 1. Example of hybrid wireless network
nections, the WiFi interface allows smartphones to conduct
short-range device-to-device (D2D) communications with
high bandwidth and per-bit energy efficiency. A common
motivation of the hybrid wireless network approaches for
mobile streaming is to prioritize the D2D transmission, such
that some video requests could be responded by nearby users
without incurring B2D traffic. This provides a promising
venue to offload the cellular traffic, and has recently at-
tracted some studies on exploiting the benefit by integrating
B2D and D2D networks for high quality mobile streaming
services. By incorporating network coding and D2D broad-
casting, in [2] and [3] the authors propose MicroCast,a
cooperative video streaming system where each smartphone
is scheduled to download a part of the video content from the
streaming server via B2D connection and to disseminate the
downloaded content to others using D2D communications.
In [4], a block-by-block delay-sensitive model is described
to support realtime streaming with guaranteed QoS over
wireless D2D networks. The proposed cost-optimal chunk
exchange algorithm minimizes the B2D traffic while satisfies
the streaming quality constraints.
To benefit from the broadcast nature of wireless commu-
nications, it is always assumed in the aforementioned D2D
based mobile streaming solutions that smartphones are co-
located within the communication range of each other and
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
241
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
240
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
240
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
240
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
240
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing
0190-3918/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPP.2015.33
240